Wednesday, July 9, 2014

npm install ENOENT errors

I've been working on a project that is built using NodeJS. Our development environment is a bit of a hybrid. Most of the developers are developing on Macs, with one exception. Our build server is on Windows and our site is running in Windows Azure. For the most part developing NodeJS on a Mac is quite straightforward. All the tooling is readily available and tends to work quite well. Not so much on Windows. So when our build server starting to run into issues installing the requestify package, we chalked it up to something not liking Windows.

We were getting ENOENT errors where npm was complaining that it couldn't find files that it was supposed to download on the file system. Since the error was happening installing a dependency of a dependency, we thought maybe it was a long paths issue. However, we couldn't even get it to install running in the root directory. We decided to use a work around to switch to a different version of that particular dependency.

Weeks later I ran into the same issue, but this time on my Mac. I found a solution by running npm cache clean before running npm install again. I tried it on the Windows build server and it started working again.